The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Under your limitations of space you have not, of course, had opportunity to elaborate8 your ‘policy’ – toleration of abuse. But I must suppose you have considered it, as a practical policy in the present world. You do not speak of your two-marriage system as a merely expedient policy, but as if it was somehow related to the Christian virtue of charity. Still I think you can only defend it as an expedient; as a surgeon who, knowing that an operation is necessary for a patient’s health, does not operate because he can’t (the patient and the patient’s foolish advisers won’t allow him); or does not even advocate the operation, because the Anti-Surgical League is so powerful and vocal that he is afraid of being beaten up. A Christian of your view is, as we have seen, committed to the belief that all people who practise ‘divorce’ – certainly divorce as it is now legalized – are misusing the human machine (whatever philosophical defence they may put up), as certainly as men who get drunk (doubtless with a philosophic defence also). They are injuring themselves, other people, and society, by their behaviour. And wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being ‘not very good’, ‘second best’ – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable. In no department is that truer than in sex – as you yourself vividly exhibit, in the comparison between a dish of bacon and strip-tease.9 You show too that you yourself suspect that the break-down of sex-reticence in our time has not made matters better but worse. Anyone in any case can see that the enormous extension and facilitation of ‘divorce’ in our days, since those of (say) Trollopean society, has done great social harm. It is a slippery slope – leading quickly to Reno,10 and beyond: in fact already to a promiscuity barely restrained by legalities: for a pair can now divorce one another, have an interlude with new partners, and then ‘re-marry’. A situation is being, has been, produced in which ordinary unphilosophical and irreligious folk are not only not restrained by law from inconstancy, but are actually by law and social custom encouraged to inconstancy. I need hardly add that a situation is thus being produced in which it is intolerably hard to bring up Christian youth in Christian sexual morals (which are ex hypothesi correct morals for all, and which will be lost but which depend upon Christian youth for their maintenance).

  On what grounds then do you part company with those Christians who resist, step by step, attempts to extend and make divorce easier? (On one point only would I agree. I do not view extension of the provisions of the law to all classes (irrespective of rank and money) as an extension of divorce – it is rather justice: if you can have real justice in evil. I think in so desperate a battle (about so fundamental and vital a matter) that resistance even of ‘cheapening’ of divorce may be defended – why not save the poor by their poverty?; but I admit that as an expedient policy it may be given an ugly twist by the enemy.)

  I should like to know on what grounds you base your ‘two-marriage’ system! From the biological-sociological point of view I gather (from Huxley and others) that monogamy is probably highly beneficial to a community. On that plane, permanence and rigid fidelity would not appear at first sight to be essential. All that the ‘social director’ requires would seem to be a high degree of sexual continence. But has this ever been, and can it ever be in fact achieved without ‘sanctions’ or religiolegal ordinance that invests the marriage contract with ‘awe’? It does not look like it. The battle may be a losing one, but I cannot help suspecting that those who fight against the divorce in this case of law and religion are in the right. Sentire cum ecclesia:11 how often one finds that this is a true guide. I say this all the more cheerfully, because on this point I myself dissented in feeling (not expressly because I am under saving obedience). But I was then still under the delusion that Christian marriage was just a bit of special behaviour of my ‘sect or order’.

  The last Christian marriage I attended was held under your system: the bridal pair were ‘married’ twice. They married one another before the Church’s witness (a priest), using one set of formulas, and making a vow of lifelong fidelity (and the woman of obedience); they then married again before the State’s witness (a registrar, and in this case – adding in my view to the impropriety – a woman) using another set of formulas and making no vow of fidelity or obedience. I felt it was an abominable proceeding – and also ridiculous, since the first set of formulas and vows included the latter as the lesser. In fact it was only not ridiculous on the assumption that the State was in fact saying by implication: I do not recognize the existence of your church; you may have taken certain vows in your meeting-place but they are just foolishness, private taboos, a burden you take on yourself: a limited and impermanent contract is all that is really necessary for citizens. In other words this ‘sharp division’ is a piece of propaganda, a counter-homily delivered to young Christians fresh from the solemn words of the Christian minister.

  [The draft ends here.]

  50 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  25 October 1943

  The poplars are now leafless except for one top spray; but it is still a green and leafy October-end down here. At no time do birches look so beautiful: their skin snow-white in the pale yellow sun, and their remaining leaves shining fallow-gold. I have to sleep at Area H.Q.1 on Friday. Tomorrow night I am going to hobnob, chez Lewis, with – Joad of Joad Hall!

  51 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  27 October 1943

  [C. E. M. Joad, well known from his broadcasts on the BBC Brains Trust, had just published The Recovery of Belief, an indication that he had returned from agnosticism to Christianity. He had been invited to dine with C. S. Lewis at Magdalen College.]

  At 9 I went to Magdalen and saw the Joad. He is (except in face) not only very like a toad, but is in character v. like Mr Toad of Toad Hall, & I now perceive that the author of the jest was more subtle than I knew. Still he is intelligent, kindly, and we agreed on many fundamental points. He has the advantage of having been in Russia – and loathing it. He says the ‘new towns’ do not rise above Willesden level, and the country does not rise at all. He said if you got into a train and looked out of the window, and then read a book for a few hours, and looked out again – there would be nothing outside to see to show that the train had moved at all!

  52 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  29 November 1943

  [In the summer of 1943, Christopher, then aged eighteen, was called up into the Royal Air Force. When this letter was written, he was at a training camp in Manchester.]

  My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari1 as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And soon down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness o
f all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes’ hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don’t seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

  Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water. Also we have still small swords to use. ‘I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.’2 Have at the Ores, with winged words, hildenasddran (war-adders), biting darts – but make sure of the mark, before shooting.

  53 To Christopher Tolkien

  9 December 1943

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  My dearest,

  I believe it is a week or more since I wrote to you? I can’t really remember, as life has been such a rush I haven’t seen C.S.L. for weeks or Williams.1. . . . The daily round(s) and the common task + + which furnish so much more than one actually asks. No great fun, no amusements; no bright new idea; not even a thin small joke. Nothing to read – and even the papers with nothing but Teheran Ballyhoo.2 Though I must admit that I smiled a kind of sickly smile and ‘nearly curled up on the floor, and the subsequent proceedings interested me no more’, when I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny & intolerance! But I must also admit that in the photograph our little cherub W. S. C.3 actually looked the biggest ruffian present. Humph, well! I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Col. Knox4 says 1/8 of the world’s population speaks ‘English’, and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame – say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say ‘baa baa’. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.

  But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying. Qua mind and spirit, and neglecting the piddling fears of timid flesh which does not want to be shot or chopped by brutal and licentious soldiery (German or other), I am not really sure that its victory is going to be so much the better for the world as a whole and in the long run than the victory of ——.5 I don’t suppose letters in are censored. But if they are, or not, I need to you hardly add that them’s the sentiments of a good many folk – and no indication of lack of patriotism. For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)), and if I was of military age, I should, I fancy, be grousing away in a fighting service, and willing to go on to the bitter end – always hoping that things may turn out better for England than they look like doing. Somehow I cannot really imagine the fantastic luck (or blessing, one would call it, if one could dimly see why we should be blessed – implying God) that has attended England is running out yet. Chi vincerà? said the Italians (before they got involved poor devils), and answered Stalin. Not altogether right perhaps. Our Cherub above referred to can play a wily hand – one guesses, one hopes, one does not know. . . . .

  Your own father.

  54 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  8 January 1944

  Remember your guardian angel. Not a plump lady with swan-wings! But – at least this is my notion and feeling –: as souls with free-will we are, as it were, so placed as to face (or to be able to face) God. But God is (so to speak) also behind us, supporting, nourishing us (as being creatures). The bright point of power where that life-line, that spiritual umbilical cord touches: there is our Angel, facing two ways to God behind us in the direction we cannot see, and to us. But of course do not grow weary of facing God, in your free right and strength (both provided ‘from behind’ as I say). If you cannot achieve inward peace, and it is given to few to do so (least of all to me) in tribulation, do not forget that the aspiration for it is not a vanity, but a concrete act. I am sorry to talk like this, and so haltingly. But I can do no more for you dearest. . . . .

  If you don’t do so already, make a habit of the ‘praises’. I use them much (in Latin): the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Laudate Dominum; the Laudate Pueri Dominum (of which I am specially fond), one of the Sunday psalms; and the Magnificat; also the Litany of Loretto (with the prayer Sub tuum praesidium). If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy. It is also a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstance keeps you from hearing Mass. So endeth Fæder lar his suna.1 With very much love.

  Longaoð þonne þy lǽs þe him con léoþa worn,

  oþþe mid hondum con hearpan grétan;

  hafaþ him his glíwes giefe, þe him God sealde.

  From the Exeter Book. Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of ‘glee’ (= music and/or verse) which God gave him.

  How these old words smite one out of the dark antiquity! ‘Longaoð’! All down the ages men (of our kind, most awarely) have felt it: not necessarily caused by sorrow, or the hard world, but sharpened by it.

  55 To Christopher Tolkien

  [Christopher had now left for South Africa, where he was to train as a pilot. This is the first of a long series of letters to him, which were numbered, for reasons which Tolkien gives here.]

  18 January 1944

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  Fæder his þriddan suna (1)1

  My dearest,

  I am afraid it is a very long time (or it seems so: actually it is about 8 days) since I wrote; but I did not quite know what to do, until we got your letter yesterday. . . . . I am glad my last long letter caught you before you went! We don’t know yet, of course, just when that was, or whither. . . . .

  I gave 2 lectures yesterday, and then conferred with Gabriel Turville-Petre2 about Cardiff. . . . . I managed just to catch the last post with my Cardiff report. Then I had to go and sleep (???) at C. HeadQ.3 I did not – not much. I was in the small C33 room: very cold and damp. But an incident occurred which moved me and made the occasion memorable. My companion in misfortune was Cecil Roth (the learned Jew historian).4 I found him charming, full of gentleness (in every sense); and we sat up till after 12 talking. He lent me his watch as there were
no going clocks in the place: – and nonetheless himself came and called me at 10 to 7: so that I could go to Communion! It seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world. Actually I was awake, and just (as one does) discovering a number of reasons (other than tiredness and having no chance to shave or even wash), such as the desirability of getting home in good time to open up and un-black and all that, why I should not go. But the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his sombre glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it. I was down at St Aloysius at 7.15 just in time to go to Confession before Mass; and I came home just before the end of Mass. . . . . I lectured at 11 a.m. (after collecting fish);5 and managed to have a colloguing with the brothers Lewis and C. Williams (at the White Horse).6 And that is about all the top off the news as far as I am concerned! Except that the fouls7 do not lay, but I have still to clean out their den. . . . .

  I start to-day numbering each letter, and each page, so that if any go awry you will know – and the bare news of importance can be made up. This is (No. 1) of Pater ad Filium Natu (sed haud alioquin) minimum:8 Fæder suna his ágnum, þám gingstan nalles unléofestan.9 (I suppose a professor of Old English may be permitted to use that language to a former pupil?: query for ref. to censor, if any). I can’t write Russian and find Polish rather sticky yet. I expect poor old Poptawski10 will be wondering how I am getting on, soon. It will be a long time before I can be of any assistance to him in devising a new technical vocabulary!!! The vocab. will just happen along anyway (if there are any Poles and Poland left). . . .