The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (78 page)

16 March 1972

Merton College

Dear R.

Everything you do for me fills me with gratitude.

I am now at last since Tuesday, IN but not ‘settled' in. The weather (which seems a slice of our normal ‘wedding-day weather' come too early) contributes to my comfort. The great bank in the Fellows' Garden looks like the foreground of a pre-Raphaelite picture: blazing green starred like the Milky Way with blue anemones, purple/white/yellow crocuses, and final surprise, clouded-yellow, peacock, and tortoiseshell butterflies flitting about.

I hope in less than a week's time to have ordered my ‘flat', except for the last labour – recalling my library from store. I have a faint hope that perhaps you and your wife could soon pick a fine day and visit me.

Excuse scrawl.

Yours ever

J. R. R. T.

30 March 1972

Merton College

My dear Rayner,

I cannot thank you adequately for your kindness and generosity, on my own behalf and for John and Priscilla, for all that you did for us to make March 27th and 28th both memorable and delightful.

I enjoyed the party immensely, not least because as I looked round everyone else seemed to be doing so too. I slept peacefully (in the great
comfort of Brown's), but briefly, waking at 6 a.m. to hear wind and rain; but feeling my luck to be in, I was not surprised to have brilliant sunshine for the occasion.

Owing to the skill and kindness of your driver both journeys were accomplished without hitch. Inside the Palace the ceremonies were, especially for ‘recipients', accompanied by some tedium (with a few touches of the comic). But I was very deeply moved by my brief meeting with the Queen, & our few words together. Quite unlike anything that I had expected. But I will say no more about that now. Perhaps I shall have a chance of seeing you, while the memory is fresh?. . . .

Yours ever

Ronald Tolkien.

Would it be possible for you to use my Christian name? I am now accepted as a member of the community here – one of the habits of which has long been the use of Christian names, irrespective of age or office – and as you are now a v. old friend, and a very dear one, I should much like also to be a ‘familiaris'.

R.

18 May 1972

Thank you for your most kind letter and for your general interest in my work. I am however now an old man struggling to finish some of his work. Every extra task however small diminishes my chance of ever publishing
The Silmarillion.
So I hope you will understand why I feel it impossible to spend time making any comments on myself or my works.

23 May 1972

Being a cult figure in one's own lifetime I am afraid is not at all pleasant. However I do not find that it tends to puff one up; in my case at any rate it makes me feel extremely small and inadequate. But even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish)
¹
cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!

25 May 1972

I fear you may be right that the search for the sources of
The Lord of the Rings
is going to occupy academics for a generation or two. I wish this need not be so. To my mind it is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive, whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered that is the most interesting thing to consider.

6[?] June 1972

As for the
Entwives
: I do not know. I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldaron about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and ‘orc-cuks' among adolescents.) But I think in Vol. II pp. 80–81
¹
it is plain that there would be for Ents no re-union in ‘history' – but Ents and their wives being rational creatures would find some ‘earthly paradise' until the end of this world: beyond which the wisdom neither of Elves nor Ents could see. Though maybe they shared the hope of Aragorn that they were ‘not bound for ever to the circles of the world and beyond them is more than memory.'. . . .

In dealing with Greek I feel like a renegade, resident wilfully for long years among ‘barbarians', though I once knew something about it. Yet I prefer Latin. I feel like Theodore Haecker
²
– or like an eminent philologist (Bazell) once a pupil of mine who is now expert in such ‘barbaric' tongues as Turkish, who once wrote to me about some language recently discovered: ‘It is of a kind that you and I both feel to be normal, in a central human mode – it indeed resembles Latin.'

30 June 1972

Merton College, Oxford

Dear Sir,

With reference to the Daily Telegraph of June 29th, page 18, I feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying ‘gloom', especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was
old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story.

It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.

Yours faithfully,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

11 July 1972

I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave. . . . . The inscription I should like is:

EDITH MARY TOLKIEN

1889–1971

Lúthien

: brief and jejune, except for
Lúthien,
which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.
^fn131

July 13. Say what you feel, without reservation, about this addition. I began this under the stress of great emotion & regret – and in any case I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement. I need advice. Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy. It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith
Lúthien
– but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the
Silmarillion
. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and
dance.
But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and
I
cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.

I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with
you.
For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things
deepest felt in tales and myths – someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives – and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.

15 July. I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead. A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and book-stores of Allen & Unwin. To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the
main
business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Despatch) was dealing with my works. I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from board-room downwards. ‘Accountancy' told me that the sales of
The Hobbit
were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights. Also a large single order for copies of
The L.R.
had just come in. When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for
The L.R.
was for 6,000.

17 September 1972

I feel the truth (now very much) of what you say about the desire, indeed necessity, of escaping from ‘community life', at intervals. The college has treated me with the greatest kindness and generosity: they have provided me with a beautiful flat with 2 large rooms & a bathroom in one of their houses in Merton Street, which has a caretaker (and his wife) who look after my domestic needs. They have made me a residential Emeritus Fellow with all the privileges of a Fellow (such as free lunch & dinner at the common table) but no duties. I am as far as they are concerned purely ‘ornamental'. The Fellow and members of Common Room are now 3 times as many, and their standard has risen v. greatly since I was an active Fellow (1945–59): they cover almost all branches of learning & science, and are nearly all (in various degrees) very good companions, though mostly very hard-working and busy. Nonetheless – I often feel very lonely, and long for a change! After term (sc. when the undergraduates depart) I am all alone in a large house with only the caretaker & his wife far below in a basement, and since I am
(especially on my return to Oxford) a marked man, and troubled with many intruders and some nefarious persons, I live behind locked doors.

I have managed to get away occasionally. And I am, of course, ‘legally' able to go and come as I wish. But I do have some obligations of courtesy as a Fellow (and of gratitude for my rescue from the despair of my situation in Jan. & Feb): and one of the chief of these occasions is the meeting of all the Fellows on the Wednesday before Full Term in October (this year October
11th
before Oct. 15th). I had already assured the Warden of my presence on Oct. 11, before I received your letter. If I seem to have prolonged the uncertainty too long, do forgive me! I am very fortunate
^fn132
, but I am not in fact yet ‘happily settled': I am still in considerable confusion.

9 November 1972

I am honoured by your letter, and quite willing that you should use the name of Rivendell as a herd prefix, though in my ignorance I don't think the actual valley of Rivendell would have been suitable for herd breeding.

I should be interested to hear what names you eventually choose (as individual names?) for your bulls; and interested to choose or invent suitable names myself if you wish. The elvish word for ‘bull' doesn't appear in any published work; it was MUNDO.

21 November 1972

I am glad to know that you were awarded a prize, but not surprised that it proved useless. I had a similar disappointment when a drinking goblet arrived (from a fan) which proved to be of steel engraved with the terrible words seen on the Ring. I of course have never drunk from it, but use it for tobacco ash.

23 November 1972

With regard to the numerals: the use of duodecimals, especially such main figures as 12 and 144, has no reference to fingers at all. The English
use duodecimals and have special words for them, namely
dozen
and
gross
. The Babylonians used duodecimals. This is due to the elementary mathematical discovery, as soon as people stop counting on their fingers and toes, that 12 is a much more convenient number than 10. I did devise numeral signs to go with the Fëanorian alphabet accommodated to both a decimal nomenclature and a duodecimal, but I have never used them and no longer hold an accurate memory of them. I am afraid the folder containing the numeral systems is not available and may be locked away in a strongroom. I remember that the numerals were written according to a positional system like the Arabic, beginning at the left with the lowest number and rising to the highest on the right.