In the matter of the proposed blurb to Tree and Leaf. . . . I am afraid that difficulty really arises from the juxtaposition of two things that only in fact touch at a corner, so to speak. I do not think I was responsible for the proposed association, and anyway it came up at a time of great troubles and distractions for me. Myself, I had for some time vaguely thought of the reprint together of three things that to my mind really do flow together: Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics; the essay On Fairy-stories; and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The first deals with the contact of the ‘heroic’ with fairy-story; the second primarily with fairy-story; and the last with ‘heroism and chivalry’.
260 From a letter to Carey Blyton
16 August 1964
[Blyton had asked Tolkien’s permission to compose a Hobbit Overture.]
You certainly have my permission to compose any work that you wished based on The Hobbit. . . . . As an author I am honoured to hear that I have inspired a composer. I have long hoped to do so, and hoped also that I might perhaps find the result intelligible to me, or feel that it was akin to my own inspiration – as much as are, say, some (but not all) of Pauline Baynes’ illustrations. . . . .
I have little musical knowledge. Though I come of a musical family, owing to defects of education and opportunity as an orphan, such music as was in me was submerged (until I married a musician), or transformed into linguistic terms. Music gives me great pleasure and sometimes inspiration, but I remain in the position in reverse of one who likes to read or hear poetry but knows little of its technique or tradition, or of linguistic structure.
261 From a letter to Anne Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Co.
30 August 1964
[A comment on an article about C. S. Lewis by one of his former pupils, George Bailey, in The Reporter, 23 April 1964.]
C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T. S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.
Well of course I could say more, but I must draw the line. Still I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should scribble over him, who have not and must know they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth. Lewis was not ‘cut to the quick’ by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry: he knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C.S.L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. ‘Fill up!’ he said, ‘and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.’ And he did not ‘readily accept’ the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised, and he did not apply. Cambridge of course wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. His friends thought it would be good for him: he was mortally tired, after nearly 30 years, of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duttons.1 It proved a good move, and until his health began too soon to fail it gave him a great deal of happiness.
262 To Michael di Capua, Pantheon Books
[Pantheon Books of New York asked Tolkien to write a preface to a new edition of George MacDonald’s The Golden Key. Although he did not in the event write it, the result of his beginning work on the preface was the composition of Smith of Wootton Major, which began as a very short story to be contained within the preface. See further Biography pp. 242–3, which quotes part of the intended preface.]
7 September 1964
76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford
Dear Mr di Capua,
I should like to write a short preface to a separate edition of The Golden Key. I am not as warm an admirer of George MacDonald as C. S. Lewis was; but I do think well of this story of his. I mentioned it in my essay On Fairy-stories. . . . .
I am not at all confident that I can produce anything worthy of the honorarium that you offer. I am not naturally attracted (in fact much the reverse) by allegory, mystical or moral. But I will do my best, if there is time. In any case I am grateful to you for your consideration.
Yours sincerely,
J. R. R. Tolkien.
263 From a letter to the Houghton Mifflin Co.
10 September 1964
I should like to offer criticism on one point, though I do not suppose that it is expected, or will be welcomed. I find the block on p. iii [of Tree and Leaf] very distasteful, and wonder if it could not perhaps be reconsidered, or omitted. The lettering is, to my taste, of a bad kind and ill-executed, and though no doubt this is deliberate, I do not like it any the better for that. The fat and apparently pollarded trunk, with no roots, and feeble branches, seems to me quite unfitting as a symbol of Tale-telling, or as a suggestion of anything that Niggle could possibly have drawn! My taste may be at fault. So may the views and sentiments expressed in the text. But if these are thought worthy of reproduction – and I am deeply gratified to find that they are – then I could wish that some design showing more sympathy with them might be produced.
264 From a letter to Allen & Unwin
11 September 1964
As you no doubt know, Houghton Mifflin are now busy re-setting Tree and Leaf. On Sept. 8 I received a large parcel containing proofs for my attention. No doubt this was a courtesy; but since it cost me £1. 7. 6 to return in time for their deadline, I am afraid a certain acerbity crept into my comment on the block designed for their p. iii: a ghastly thing, like a cross between a fat sea-anemone and a pollarded spanish chestnut, plastered with lettering of indecent ugliness.
265 From a letter to David Kolb, S.J.
11 November 1964
It is sad that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C.S.L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his. Also, I personally found Letters to Malcolm a distressing and in parts horrifying work. I began a commentary on it, but if finished it would not be publishable.
266 From a letter to Michael George Tolkien
6 January 1965
[Tolkien’s grandson was studying English at St Andrew’s University.]
I am sorry my Gawain and Pearl will not be in time to assist you (if indeed they would): largely owing, in addition to the natural difficulty of rendering verse into verse, to my discovering many minor points about words, in the course of my work, which lead me off. Pearl is, of course, about as difficult a task as any translator could be set. It is impossible to make a version in the same metre close enough to serve as a ‘crib’. But I think anyone who reads my version, however learned a Middle English scholar, will get a more direct impression of the poem’s impact (on one who knew the language). But truthfully it is I suppose just a private amusement.
267 From a letter to Michael Tolkien
9–10 January 1965
My dear old protector, backer, and friend Dr C. T. Onions died on Friday at 91⅓ years. I had not seen him for a long while. He was the last of the people who were ‘English’ at Oxford and at large when I entered the profession. Well not quite: Kenneth Sisam (once my tutor) survives in the Scilly Isles, a mere 76. Incidentally, while on this melancholy subject, T. S. Eliot has gone. But if you want a perfect specimen of bad verse, a ludicrous ‘all-time low’, about [on the level] of the ‘stuffed owl’ revived, I could [not] find you a better than poor old John Masefield’s 8 lines on Eliot in The Times of Friday Jan. 8: ‘East Coker’. Almost down/up to Wordsworth’s zero-standard. . . . .
I am neither disturbed (nor surprised) at the limitations of my ‘fame’. There are lots of people in Oxford who have never heard of me, let alone of my books. But I can repay many of them with e
qual ignorance: neither wilful nor contemptuous, simply accidental. An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: ‘it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before’. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her. . . . .
Still the old ‘ego’ gets quite a lot of strong boosts now and again, which surprise me as much as ever. I met Burke Trend on September 29th, at the Merton Septcentenary Dinner – he is a recent honorary Fellow: secretary to the Cabinet then and now: and he declared himself as a ‘fan’, and added that most of the Cabinet was with him, and as for the House similar views were widely prevalent on both sides of it. Good enough, if they buy the book and don’t merely wear out the House of Commons Library copy! No other kind of reward seems in the offing. But I suppose my greatest surprise was 4 days ago to get a warm fan-letter from Iris Murdoch. And if that name is just an ‘Ava Gardner’ to you, it can’t be helped. . . . .
When I think of my mother’s death (younger than Prisca) worn out with persecution, poverty, and. largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away [from the Church]. Of course Canaan seems different to those who have come into it out of the desert; and the later inhabitants of Jerusalem may often seem fools or knaves, or worse. But in hac urbe lux solemnis1 has seemed to me steadily true. I have met snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests ‘in the course of my peregrinations’; but for me one Fr. Francis outweighs them all, and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was – and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the ‘liberal’ darkness out of which I came, knowing more about ‘Bloody Mary’ than the Mother of Jesus – who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.
268 From a letter to Miss A. P. Northey
19 January 1965
I think Shadowfax certainly went with Gandalf [across the Sea], though this is not stated. I feel it is better not to state everything (and indeed it is more realistic, since in chronicles and accounts of ‘real’ history, many facts that some enquirer would like to know are omitted, and the truth has to be discovered or guessed from such evidence as there is). I should argue so: Shadowfax came of a special race (II 126, 129, III 346)1 being as it were an Elvish equivalent of ordinary horses: his ‘blood’ came from ‘West over Sea’. It would not be unfitting for him to ‘go West’. Gandalf was not ‘dying’, or going by a special grace to the Western Land, before passing on ‘beyond the circles of the world’: he was going home, being plainly one of the ‘immortals’, an angelic emissary of the angelic governors (Valar) of the Earth. He would take or could take what he loved. Gandalf was last seen riding Shadowfax (III 276). He must have ridden to the Havens, and it is inconceivable that he would [have] ridden any beast but Shadowfax; so Shadowfax must have been there. A chronicler winding up a long tale, and for the moment moved principally by the sorrow of those left behind (himself among them!) might omit mention of the horse; but had the great horse also shared in the grief of sundering, he could hardly have been forgotten.
269 From a letter to W. H. Auden
12 May 1965
[Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.]
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don’t feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190,1 where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable. . . . .
One of my troubles is that I was just sending into press a revision of my translation of Gawain together with one of Pearl when a desperate problem of U.S.A. copyright fell on me, and I must now devote all the time I have to produce a revision of both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit that can be copyrighted and, it is hoped, defeat the pirates.
270 To Rayner Unwin
[Tolkien had sent Unwin the typescript of his new story Smith of Wootton Major. It seemed to Unwin to need the companionship of other stories to make a sufficiently large book. This suggestion came just as Tolkien was revising The Lord of the Rings, so as to produce a new edition that would be protected by U.S.A. copyright. The need for this arose because an American publisher had issued an unauthorised paperback edition of the book, without the consent of Tolkien or Allen & Unwin, and (at first) without paying royalties.]
20 May 1965
76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford
Dear Rayner,
Thank you very much for the return of Smith of Wootton Major. I am delighted that it pleased you, as I was quite unable to make my own mind up about it without your assistance. I am afraid there is nothing of similar sort or length deep among my papers. There is a lot of unfinished material there, but everything belongs definitely to the Silmarillion or all that world. To which I should now be in only a few days returning, if it was not for this infernal copyright business. I shall be sending you the remainder of the text of Gawain and my comments on the specimen pages you sent me, to reach you I hope by Monday next. I cannot produce the prefatory note or the commentary until the revision of The Lord of the Rings is finished. I shall have to work hard to get it to Boston1 by July 1.
Yours sincerely,
Ronald Tolkien.
PS. I am now inserting in every note of acknowledgement to readers in the U.S.A. a brief note informing them that Ace Books is a pirate, and asking them to inform others.
271 From a letter to Rayner Unwin
25 May 1965
I am not relishing the task of ‘re-editing’ The Lord of the Rings. I think it will prove very difficult if not impossible to make any substantial changes in the general text. Volume I has now been gone through and the number of necessary or desirable corrections is very small. I am bound to say that my admiration for the tightness of the author’s construction is somewhat increased. The poor fellow (who now seems to me only a remote friend) must have put a lot of work into it. I am hoping that alteration of the introductions, considerable modifications of the appendices and the inclusion of an index may prove sufficient for the purpose. Incidentally, I am making a point of including a note in every answer or acknowledgement of ‘fan’ letters from the U.S.A. to the effect that the paperback edition of Ace Books is piratical and issued without the consent of my publishers or myself and of course without remuneration to us. Do you think that if this were done on a larger scale it might be useful?
272 From a letter to Zillah Sherring
20 July 1965
[In a second-hand bookshop in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Zillah Sherring found and bought a copy of The Fifth Book of Thucy
dides which contained a number of strange inscriptions that had been written in it by a previous owner. Finding Tolkien’s name among those on the flyleaf, she wrote to him asking if the inscriptions, particularly a long one at the back, had possibly been his work. She sent him a transcript of it. This is a facsimile of the inscription:]
The book certainly once belonged to me. . . . . The writing on the back page is in Gothic, or what I thought was Gothic or might be. I had come across this admirable language a year or two before 1910 in Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language (now replaced by A Grammar of the Gothic Language). It was sold to me by a school-friend interested in missionary work, who had thought it a Bible Society product and had no use for what it was. I was fascinated by Gothic in itself: a beautiful language, which reached the eminence of liturgical use, but failed owing to the tragic history of the Goths to become one of the liturgical languages of the West. At the time I had only the Primer with its small vocabulary, but I had learned from it some of the technique necessary for converting the words of other Germanic languages into Gothic script. I often put ‘Gothic’ inscriptions in books, sometimes Gothicizing my Norse name and German surname as Ruginwaldus Dwalakōneis. The inscription you cite is at fault (by accident) in HVNDAI which should be HVNDA. It is also bad Gothic in other respects, but was intended to mean: I read the words of these booksfn104 of Greek history (‘year-writing’) in the sixth month of this year: thousand, nine hundreds, ten, of Our Lord: in order to gain the prize given every year to the boy knowing most about Thucydides, and this I inscribed in my booksfn105 on the twelfth of the sixth (month) after I had already ? first read through all the words carefully. Frumins is probably an error for frumist ‘first’.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Page 49
