J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  By now, opinions were firmly polarised. The book had acquired its champions and its enemies, and as W. A. Auden wrote: ‘Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion; either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre, or they cannot abide it.’ And this was how it was to remain for the rest of Tolkien’s life: extreme praise from one faction, total contempt from the other. On the whole Tolkien himself did not mind this very much; indeed it amused him. He wrote of it:

  The Lord of the Rings

  is one of those things:

  if you like you do:

  if you don’t, then you boo!

  Oxford University did not exactly boo. It was too polite to do that. But, as Tolkien himself reported, his colleagues said to him: ‘Now we know what you have been doing all these years! Why the edition of this, and the commentary on that, and the grammars and glossaries, have all remained “promised” but unfinished. You have had your fun and you must now do some work.’ The first fruit of this demand was a lecture, already overdue by many months, in a series on the Celtic element in the English language. Tolkien delivered it under the title ‘English and Welsh’ on 21 October 1955, the day after the publication of The Return of the King. It was a long and rather diffuse examination of the relationship between the two languages, but it was intended (as Tolkien explained) as little more than a curtain-raiser for the series. Certainly it contains much of value in the way of autobiographical comment by Tolkien on the history of his own interest in languages. At the beginning of the lecture Tolkien apologised for its tardiness, adding in mitigation that among the many tasks which had hindered him was ‘the long-delayed appearance of a large “work”, if it can be called that, which contains, in the way of presentation that I find most natural, much of what I personally have received from the study of things Celtic’.

  By now it had become clear that The Lord of the Rings was not going to lose a thousand pounds for Allen & Unwin. Sales of the book increased steadily, if not yet remarkably. They were boosted by a radio dramatisation of the book, which inevitably did not meet with Tolkien’s approval, for if he had reservations about drama in general he was even more strongly opposed to the ‘adaptation’ of stories, believing that this process invariably reduced them to their merely human and thus most trivial level. However the radio broadcasts contributed to the book’s popularity, and early in 1956 Tolkien received his first payment from Allen & Unwin under the ‘half profits’ agreement, a cheque for more than three and a half thousand pounds. This was considerably more than his annual salary from the university, and though he was of course delighted he also realised that income tax was going to be a very serious problem. Sales rose even more during 1956, and the cheque that he received a year later was substantially larger. In consequence of this unexpected income he wished that he had opted for retirement from his professorship at sixty-five instead of agreeing (as he had) to continue until sixty-seven, the usual Oxford retiring age. Worries about tax, which soon proved to be justified, also meant that when in 1957 Marquette University, a Catholic institution in the Middle West of America, offered to buy the manuscripts of his principal published stories, he accepted with alacrity. The sum of £1,250 (which was then the equivalent of five thousand dollars) was paid, and in the spring of 1958 the originals of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham, together with the still unpublished Mr Bliss, made their way across the Atlantic.

  Besides money, The Lord of the Rings was bringing Tolkien a large number of fan-letters. Those who wrote included a real Sam Gamgee, who had not read The Lord of the Rings but had heard that his name appeared in the story. Tolkien was delighted, explained how he had come by the name, and sent Mr Gamgee a signed copy of all three volumes. Later he said: ‘For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed “S. Gollum”. That would have been more difficult to deal with.’

  Allen & Unwin had begun to negotiate for translations of The Lord of the Rings into foreign languages. The first result of this was the Dutch edition, published in 1956, after Tolkien had made stringent criticisms of the translator’s first attempts to render the complex series of names in the story into his own language. In the end Tolkien was satisfied with the Dutch version, but he was much less pleased with a Swedish translation of the book that appeared three years later. Not only did he disapprove of much of the actual translation (he had a working knowledge of Swedish) but he was also angered by a foreword to the book inserted by the translator. Tolkien called this foreword ‘five pages of impertinent nonsense’. In it, the translator interpreted The Lord of the Rings as an allegory of contemporary world politics, referred to Tolkien telling the story to ‘a host of grandchildren’ and described the scenery of the very ordinary Oxford suburb of Headington where Tolkien was now living (which stands on a slight eminence known as Headington Hill) as ‘the leafy orchard-landscape … with the Barrowdowns or Headington Hills in the rear’. After Tolkien had registered a strong protest, this foreword was withdrawn by the Swedish publishers from further editions of the book.

  In the following years The Lord of the Rings was translated into all the major European languages, and many others, with the consequence that Tolkien received a number of invitations to travel abroad and be fêted. He accepted only one such invitation, to go to Holland in the spring of 1958, and this expedition proved a great success. He was assured of a warm welcome, for he had been friends for several years with Professor Piet Harting of Amsterdam University, who met him on his arrival and entertained him regally. The main event was a ‘Hobbit Dinner’ organised by a Rotterdam bookseller, at which Tolkien made a lively speech in English interspersed with Dutch and Elvish. It was in part a parody of Bilbo’s party speech at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, and it concluded with Tolkien recalling ‘that it is now exactly twenty years since I began in earnest to complete the history of our revered hobbit-ancestors of the Third Age. I look East, West, North, South, and I do not see Sauron; but I see that Saruman has many descendants. We Hobbits have against them no magic weapons. Yet, my gentlehobbits, I give you this toast: To the Hobbits, May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees.’

  By this time it was clear that The Lord of the Rings was something of an international ‘hot property’. Stanley Unwin warned Tolkien that offers would soon be forthcoming for the film rights, and the two men agreed upon their policy: either a respectable ‘treatment’ of the book, or else a good deal of money. As Sir Stanley put it, the choice was between ‘cash or kudos’. The first overtures from the film world came at the end of 1957 when Tolkien was approached by three American businessmen who showed him drawings for a proposed animated motion-picture of The Lord of the Rings. These gentlemen (Mr Forrest J. Ackerman, Mr Morton Grady Zimmerman, and Mr Al Brodax) also delivered to him a scenario or ‘Story Line’ for the proposed film. Reading this, Tolkien discovered that it did not exactly treat the book with respect. A number of names were consistently mis-spelt (Boromir was rendered ‘Borimor’), virtually all walking was dispensed with in the story and the Company of the Ring were transported everywhere on the backs of eagles, and the elvish waybread lembas was described as a ‘food concentrate’. There did not seem to be much prospect of kudos in this, and as there was not much cash either, negotiations were not continued. But it was an indication of things to come. In the meanwhile Tolkien’s income from his books remained high. ‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘I cannot help feeling there is a lot to be said for “the grosser forms of literary success” as a sneering critic recently called it.’

  Sales of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings continued to rise steadily, but there was no drastic change in the pattern until 1965. Early in that year it was learnt that an American publisher who appeared not to suffer from an excess of scruples was planning to issue an unauthorised paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, almost certainly without paying royalties to Tolkien. Because of the confused state of American copyright at that time, the publisher doubtless thought that he could do thi
s with impunity; and he also realised that such an edition would probably sell widely, especially among American students, who were already showing an interest in the book. The only way to save the situation was for Tolkien’s authorised American publishers, Houghton Mifflin, to issue their own paperback as quickly as possible, and this they planned to do, in collaboration with Ballantine Books. But in order to register this new edition as copyright, they would have to make a number of textual changes so that the book was technically ‘new’. Rayner Unwin came to Oxford to explain all this to Tolkien, and to ask him to make some hasty revisions of The Lord of the Rings, and of The Hobbit, so that the latter book could be protected as well. Tolkien agreed, and Unwin returned, satisfied, to London.

  Normally the very mention of the word ‘revision’ set Tolkien to work. But on this occasion he did nothing about it for the time being. He was quite used to missing deadlines and failing to meet urgent demands for manuscripts, and now he continued to polish his new story Smith of Wootton Major (which he had just written), and to work also on his translation of Gawain, and on some notes on the Elvish poem ‘Namárië’ which the composer Donald Swann wanted to set to music as part of a Tolkien song-cycle. By the time he had finished all these tasks it was June, and what Tolkien and others regarded as an American ‘pirate’ edition of The Lord of the Rings had been issued.

  The publishers were Ace Books, who (when challenged) alleged there was nothing illegal in their paperback, even though it was printed entirely without the permission of Tolkien or his authorised publishers, and even though no royalty payment had been offered to the author. Indeed the Ace edition had also been manufactured with some care, so that it was quite a bargain at seventy-five cents for each volume. There were a number of errors in the typesetting, but on the whole the printers had reproduced Tolkien’s text accurately; ludicrously so, since they had included both the promise in the foreword of the index of names and the note at the end apologising for its absence. Ace were already well known as publishers of science fiction, and clearly a lot of people were going to buy their edition until an authorised paperback could be issued. An urgent request was sent to Tolkien to complete the revisions (which it was assumed he had been working on assiduously for the last six months) as soon as possible.

  So Tolkien began, though he turned not to The Lord of the Rings for which revision was urgent, but to The Hobbit for which it was not. He spent many hours searching for some revision notes that he had already made, but he could not find them. Instead he found a typescript of ‘The New Shadow’ a sequel to The Lord of the Rings which he had begun a long time ago but had abandoned after a few pages. It was about the return of evil to Middle-earth. He sat up till four a.m. reading it and thinking about it. When the next day he did get down to The Hobbit he found a good deal of it ‘very poor’ and had to restrain himself from rewriting the entire book. The business of making revisions took some time, and when he turned at last to The Lord of the Rings the summer was well advanced. He decided on a number of changes that would correct remaining inaccuracies, and checked through the index which had now been prepared for him, but it was not until August that he was able to send the revised text to America.

  Meanwhile the authorised paperback publishers, Ballantine Books, had decided that they could not wait any longer. In order to get at least one Tolkien book into the shops they published The Hobbit in the original text without waiting for Tolkien’s revisions, which they planned to include in a later edition. They sent him a copy, and he was astonished by the picture on the cover. Ace Books for all their moral ‘piracy’ had employed a cover artist who knew something about the story, but Ballantine’s cover picture seemed to have no relevance whatever to The Hobbit, for it showed a hill, two emus, and a curious tree bearing bulbous fruit. Tolkien exploded: ‘What has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs?’ When the reply came that the artist hadn’t time to read the book, and that the object with pink bulbs was ‘meant to suggest a Christmas tree’ Tolkien could only answer: ‘I begin to feel that I am shut up in a madhouse.’

  Late in 1965 the ‘authorised’ paperback of The Lord of the Rings was published in America in three volumes, with Tolkien’s revisions incorporated, and with the emus and the Christmas tree on the cover of the first volume, though this picture was later removed and one of Tolkien’s own drawings was substituted; two more of his pictures were used for the second and third volumes. Each copy carried a message from Tolkien: ‘This paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.’

  But this did not immediately produce the desired result. The Ballantine edition (because it paid a royalty) cost twenty cents per volume more than the Ace edition, and the American student buyers did not at first show a preference for it. Clearly something more would have to be done. Curiously Tolkien himself played a prominent and efficient part in the campaign that now began; curiously, because he was no businessman, and ironically, because the unbusinesslike habits of his recent years were now turned to good advantage. He had been accustomed to ‘waste’ many hours that ought to have been spent on completing work for publication by writing innumerable replies to fan-letters, but this did mean that he had already built up an affectionate following of many dozens of enthusiastic correspondents, especially in America, and they were now only too glad to spring to his defence. On his own initiative he began to include a note in all his replies to American readers, informing them that the Ace edition was unauthorised, and asking them to tell their friends. This soon had a remarkable effect. American readers not only began to refuse to buy the Ace edition but demanded, often in forcible terms, that booksellers remove it from their shelves. A fan-club, ‘The Tolkien Society of America’ which had recently been formed, now joined in the battle. By the end of the year the sales of Ace copies began to fall sharply; and when the cause was taken up by the Science Fiction Writers of America, an influential body that now applied considerable pressure to Ace, the result was that Ace wrote to Tolkien offering to pay him a royalty for every copy they had sold, and stating that they would not reprint after their present stocks had been exhausted. So a treaty was signed, and ‘The War over Middle-earth’ as one journalist had dubbed it, came to an end.

  But the most important consequence was yet to come. The dispute had attracted considerable publicity, and as a result Tolkien’s name and the titles of his books were now very widely known in America. Approximately one hundred thousand copies of the Ace edition of The Lord of the Rings had been sold during 1965, but this figure was soon passed by the ‘authorised’ paperback, which quickly reached the one million mark. Ace had unwittingly done a service to Tolkien, for they had helped to lift his book from the ‘respectable’ hard-cover status in which it had languished for some years and had put it at the top of the popular best-sellers. And by now a ‘campus cult’ had begun.

  Clearly there was much in Tolkien’s writing that appealed to American students. Its implied emphasis on the protection of natural scenery against the ravages of an industrial society harmonised with the growing ecological movement, and it was easy to see The Lord of the Rings as a tract for the times. But its chief appeal lay, as Lewis had seen long ago, in its unabashed return to heroic romance. The harsher critics might call it escapism, while the harsher still might compare it to the sinister influence of the hallucinatory drugs that were then fashionable in some student circles, but, whatever the reason, to hundreds of thousands of young Americans the story of Frodo’s journey with the Ring now became The Book, surpassing all previous best-sellers. At the end of 1966 a newspaper reported: ‘At Yale the trilogy is selling faster than William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at its crest. At Harvard it is outpacing J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.’ Lapel badges began to appear bearing slogans such as ‘Frodo Lives’ ‘Gandalf for President’ and ‘Come to Middle-e
arth’. Branches of the Tolkien Society mushroomed along the West Coast and in New York State, and eventually grew into the ‘Mytho-poeic Society’ devoted also to studying the works of C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Members of fan-clubs held ‘hobbit picnics’ at which they ate mushrooms and drank cider, and dressed up as characters from the stories. Eventually, Tolkien’s writings began to achieve respectability in American academic circles, and were the subject of theses with such titles as ‘A Parametric Analysis of Antithetical Conflict and Irony in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’. Volumes of Tolkien criticism began to appear in campus bookshops. A President’s daughter, an astronaut, and a film star wrote to express their enthusiasm for Tolkien’s writings. Among the graffiti that could be seen on American walls was: ‘J. R. R. Tolkien is Hobbit-forming.’

  The wildfire of this American enthusiasm spread to other countries. At festivities in Saigon a Vietnamese dancer was seen bearing the lidless eye of Sauron on his shield, and in North Borneo a ‘Frodo Society’ was formed. At about the same time, interest in Tolkien’s books showed a marked increase in Britain, partly because those who had first read them as children were now reaching adulthood and were communicating their enthusiasm to their friends, and partly as a reflection of the cult that had grown up in America. British sales of the books rose sharply, a Tolkien Society began to meet in London and elsewhere in the country, students at Warwick University renamed the Ring Road around their campus ‘Tolkien Road’ and a ‘psychedelic magazine’ entitled Gandalf’s Garden was issued with the avowed objective ‘to bring beautiful people together’. Its first issue explained that Gandalf ‘is fast becoming absorbed in the youthful world spirit as the mythological hero of the age’.