The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (77 page)

Gamgee
is quite a different matter. In my early days
gamgee
was the word we used for what is/was more generally called ‘cotton-wool'. . . . . Recently in the English Place Names Society volumes on Gloucestershire (vol. iii) I came across forms that could conceivably explain the curious
Gamgee
as a variant of the not uncommon surname
Gamage (Gammage, Gammidge
). This name is ultimately derived from a surname
de Gamaches
. . . . but early records of the forms of this name in England, as
Gamages, de Gamagis, de Gemegis,
might well provide a variant
Gamagi > Gamgee
.

Your reference to
Samson Gamgee
is thus very interesting. Since he is mentioned in a book on Birmingham Jewry, I wonder if this family was also Jewish. In which case the origin of the name might be quite different. Not that a name of French or Francized form is impossible for a Jewish surname, especially if it is one long established in England. We now associate Jewish names largely with German, and with a colloquial Yiddish that is predominantly German in origin.
^fn129
But the lingua franca of mediæval Jewry was (I was told by Cecil Roth, a friend of mine) of French or mixed French-Provencal character.

17 July 1971

The ‘immortals' who were permitted to leave Middle-earth and seek
Aman
– the undying lands of
Valinor
and
Eressëa
, an island assigned to the
Eldar
– set sail in ships specially made and hallowed for this voyage, and steered due West towards the ancient site of these lands. They only set out after sundown; but if any keen-eyed observer from that shore had watched one of these ships he might have seen that it never became hull-down but dwindled only by distance until it vanished in the
twilight: it followed the straight road to the true West and not the bent road of the earth's surface. As it vanished it left the physical world. There was no return. The Elves who took this road and those few ‘mortals' who by special grace went with them, had abandoned the ‘History of the world' and could play no further part in it.

The angelic immortals (incarnate only at their own will), the
Valar
or regents under God, and others of the same order but less power and majesty (such as Olórin = Gandalf) needed no transport, unless they for a time remained incarnate, and they could, if allowed or commanded, return.

As for
Frodo
or other mortals, they could only dwell in
Aman
for a limited time – whether brief or long. The
Valar
had neither the power nor the right to confer ‘immortality' upon them. Their sojourn was a ‘purgatory', but one of peace and healing and they would eventually pass away
(die
at their own desire and of free will) to destinations of which the Elves knew nothing.

This general idea lies behind the events of
The Lord of the Rings
and the
Silmarillion,
but it is not put forward as geologically or astronomically ‘true'; except that some special physical catastrophe is supposed to lie behind the legends and marked the first stage in the succession of Men to dominion of the world. But the legends are mainly of ‘Mannish' origin blended with those of the Sindar (Gray-elves) and others who had never left Middle-earth.

24 July 1971

I do miss seeing you very much, though it is inevitable since your accession to the throne: + of course all the care of men: uneasy lies the head that wears the father's bowler.

25 August 1971

I did not know Auden personally as a young man and in fact I have only met and spoken to him very few times in my life.

So far as his interest in Old English Poetry was due to me, this was derived from my public lectures and was mainly due to his own natural talents and the possession of an ‘open ear' among the majority of the deaf.

I am, however, very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His
support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it.

I regard him as one of my great friends although we have so seldom met except through letters and gifts of his works. I tried to repay him and express part of my feelings by writing a commendatory poem in Old English, which appeared in a volume of
Shenandoah
celebrating his sixtieth birthday.

[Autumn 1971]

[19 Lakeside Road]

Dear Miss Batten-Phelps,

I am sorry that your letter (written on August 20th) was delayed in reaching me, and has then again waited so long for an answer. I am harassed by many things and the endless ‘business' of my affairs; and I am in constant anxiety owing to my wife's failing health. . . . .

I was much interested in your references to M. R. Ridley.
¹
We of course knew one another well at Oxford. . . . . Not until I got your letter did I learn that he had done me the honour of placing the works of his old colleague in the ranks of ‘literature', and gaining me intelligent and well-equipped readers. Not a soil in which the fungus-growth of cults is likely to arise. The horrors of the American scene I will pass over, though they have given me great distress and labour. (They arise in an entirely different mental climate and soil, polluted and impoverished to a degree only paralleled by the lunatic destruction of the physical lands which Americans inhabit.). . . .

I am very grateful for your remarks on the critics and for your account of your personal delight in
The Lord of the Rings.
You write in terms of such high praise that [to] accept it with just a ‘thank you' might seem complacently conceited, though actually it only makes me wonder how this has been achieved – by me! Of course the book was written to please myself (at different levels), and as an experiment in the arts of long narrative, and of inducing ‘Secondary Belief'. It was written slowly and with great care for detail, & finally emerged as a Frameless Picture: a searchlight, as it were, on a brief episode in History, and on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space. Very well: that may explain to some extent why it ‘feels' like history; why it was accepted for publication; and why it has proved readable for a large number of very different kinds of people. But it does not fully explain what has actually happened. Looking back
on the wholly unexpected things that have followed its publication – beginning at once with the appearance of Vol. I – I feel as if an ever darkening sky over our present world had been suddenly pierced, the clouds rolled back, and an almost forgotten sunlight had poured down again. As if indeed the horns of Hope had been heard again, as Pippin heard them suddenly at the absolute
nadir
of the fortunes of the West.
But How?
and
Why?

I think I can now guess what Gandalf would reply. A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have forgotten (though I believe he was well-known). He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate
The Lord of the Rings
long before its time. He brought one or two reproductions. I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of literature and languages. When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Suddenly he said: ‘Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?'

Pure Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G. to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said: ‘No, I don't suppose so any longer.' I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should puff any one up who considers the imperfections of ‘chosen instruments', and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.

You speak of ‘a sanity and sanctity' in
the L.R.
‘which is a power in itself'. I was deeply moved. Nothing of the kind had been said to me before. But by a strange chance, just as I was beginning this letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as ‘an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling … but you', he said, ‘create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp'. I can only answer: ‘Of his own sanity no man can securely judge. If sanctity inhabits his work or as a pervading light illumines it then it does not come from him but through him. And neither of you would perceive it in these terms unless it was with you also. Otherwise you would see and feel nothing, or (if some other spirit was present) you would be filled with contempt, nausea, hatred. “Leaves out of the elf-country, gah!” “Lembas – dust and ashes, we don't eat that.”

Of course
The L.R.
does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world, though naturally I take a deep interest in its fortunes, as a parent would of a child. I am
comforted to know that it has good friends to defend it against the malice of its enemies. (But all the fools are not in the other camp.) With best wishes to one of its best friends. I am

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

[October 1971]

I have no time to provide bibliographical material concerning criticisms, reviews, or translations.

The following points, however, I should like to make briefly. (1) One of my strongest opinions is that investigation of an author's biography (or such other glimpses of his ‘personality' as can be gleaned by the curious) is an entirely vain and false approach to his works – and especially to a
work of narrative art,
of which the object aimed at by the author was to be
enjoyed
as such: to be read with literary
pleasure.
So that any reader whom the author has (to his great satisfaction) succeded in ‘pleasing' (exciting, engrossing, moving etc.), should, if he wishes others to be similarly pleased, endeavour in his own words, with only the book itself as his source, to induce them to read it for literary pleasure. When they have read it, some readers will (I suppose) wish to ‘criticize' it, and even to analyze it, and if that is their mentality they are, of course, at liberty to do these things – so long as they have
first
read it with attention throughout. Not that this attitude of mind has my sympathy: as should be clearly perceived in Vol. I p. 272: Gandalf: ‘He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.'

(2) I have very little interest in serial literary history, and no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ‘novel'. My work is
not
a ‘novel', but an ‘heroic romance' a much older and quite different variety of literature.

(3) Affixing ‘labels' to writers, living or dead, is an inept procedure, in any circumstances: a childish amusement of small minds: and very ‘deadening', since at best it overemphasizes what is common to a selected group of writers, and distracts attention from what is
individual
(and not classifiable) in each of them, and is the element that gives them life (if they have any). But I cannot understand how I should be labelled ‘a believer in moral didacticism'. Who by? It is in any case the exact opposite of my procedure in
The Lord of the Rings.
I neither preach nor teach.

1 November 1971

I am v. sorry about this: your letter of 19th October is still unanswered, although it was one of the most kind and encouraging letters I have received from any one. I must ask you to believe that
letters
(of any length) to an isolated man are like bread to a prisoner starving in a tower.

29 November 1971

[Miramar Hotel, Bournemouth]

My dear Cater,

I am grieved to tell you that my wife died this morning. Her courage and determination (of which you speak truly) carried her through to what seemed the brink of recovery, but a sudden relapse occurred which she fought for nearly three days in vain. She died at last in peace.

I am utterly bereaved, and cannot yet lift up heart, but my family is gathering round me and many friends. There will be notices in
Times
and
Telegraph.
I am glad that you saw her still undimmed on Thursday (18th I think), before she fell ill on Friday night (19). I shall treasure your letter of 26th, especially for its last lines.

Yours ever sincerely

Ronald Tolkien.

24 January 1972

West Hanney
¹

Dearest Mick,

. . . . I think the news will comfort and please you. By an act of great generosity – in spite of great internal difficulties – Merton has now provided [me] with a very excellent flat, which will probably accommodate the bulk of my surviving ‘library'. But wholly unexpected ‘strings' are attached to this! (1) The rent will be ‘merely nominal' – which means what it implies: something extremely small in comparison with actual market-value; (2) All or any furniture required will be provided
free
by the college – and a large Wilton carpet has already been assigned to me, covering the whole floor of a sitting room having nearly
the same floor-space as our big s[itting]-r[oom] at 19 Lakeside Road (it is a little shorter and a little broader). (3) Since 21 M[erton] St. is legally part of the college, domestic service is provided
free
: in the shape of a resident care-taker and his wife as housekeeper: (4) I am entitled to
free
lunch
and
dinner throughout the year when in residence: both of a very high standard. This represents – allowing 9 weeks absence – an actual emolument of between £750 and £900 a year from which the claws of the I. Taxgatherers have so far been driven off. (5) The college will provide free of rent two telephones: (a) for
local
calls, and calls to extensions, which are
free
, and (b) for long distance calls, which will have a private number and be paid by me. This will have the advantage that business and private calls to family and friends will not pass through the overworked lodge; but it will have the one snag that it will have to appear in the Telephone book, and cannot be ex-directory. But I had already found in Poole that the disadvantages of an ex-directory number (which are considerable) really outweigh its protection. If it proves a nuisance I shall have a telephone answerer installed, that can be switched on at need. (6) No rates, and gas and electricity bills at a reduced scale; (7) The use of 2 beautiful common-rooms (at a distance of 100 yards) with free writing paper, free newspapers, and mid-morning coffee. It all sounds too good to be true – and of course it all depends on my health: for it has, quite justly and rightly, been pointed out to me that it is only my apparent good health and mobility for my age that makes this arrangement possible. I do not myself feel very secure on this point since my illness in October (in which in a week or so I lost over a stone), that did not really lose its head until after Christmas. But the feeling of insecurity is possibly (and I hope) due mainly to the maiming effect of the bereavement we have suffered. I do not feel quite ‘real' or whole, and in a sense there is no one to talk to. (You share this, of course, especially in the matter of letters.) Since I came of age, and our 3 years separation was ended, we had shared all joys and griefs, and all opinions (in agreement or otherwise), so that I still often find myself thinking ‘I must tell E. about this' – and then suddenly I feel like a castaway left on a barren island under a heedless sky after the loss of a great ship. I remember trying to tell Marjorie Incledon
²
this feeling, when I was not yet thirteen after the death of my mother (Nov. 9. 1904), and vainly waving a hand at the sky saying ‘it is so empty and cold'. And again I remember after the death of Fr Francis my ‘second father' (at 77 in 1934)
^fn130
, saying to C. S. Lewis: ‘I feel like a lost survivor into a new alien world after the real world has passed away.' But of course these griefs however poignant (especially the first) came in youth with life and work still unfolding. In
1904 we (H[ilary] & I) had the sudden miraculous experience of Fr Francis' love and care and humour – and only 5 years later (the equiv. of 20 years experience in later life) I met the Lúthien Tinúviel of my own personal ‘romance' with her long dark hair, fair face and starry eyes, and beautiful voice. And in 1934 she was still with me, and her beautiful children. But now she has gone before Beren, leaving him indeed one-handed, but he has no power to move the inexorable Mandos, and there is no
Dor Gyrth i chuinar
, the Land of the Dead that Live, in this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped. . . . .